The Birds (1963)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 119 mins.


Alfred Hitchcock utilized many motifs and recurring devices through his long career: the wrongfully accused man, the ubiquitous presence of trains, tall and foreboding staircases, the audience-as-voyeur, etc. It is odd that perhaps the most common device associated with him as far as public consciousness is concerned — the bird — occurs only in two films. Avian imagery is layered throughout Psycho (the taxidermic hobby of Norman Bates in the motel parlor; the way he pecks at his food and becomes ensnared in the fate of a woman with the last name Crane), but such imagery serves primarily as a sly metaphor as opposed to something that drives the film.

However, The Birds, his eagerly anticipated 1963 follow-up to Psycho, speaks for itself right in the title. Whatever your opinion on the film, it's impossible to deny that a flock of many birds turns the brain toward the Hitchcockian side of life, and in some cases, Hitchcockian nightmares. From a respective standpoint, such a connection is an anomaly in the director's canon.

I don't think Hitchcock made another masterpiece after Psycho, but The Birds comes closer than any of his later films. It is the last great film made by a great director — not flawless, but certainly a strong and exemplarily crafted horror film. Where does it fall short? I'm not aware of many who still step up in defense of its rather milquetoast stars: Tippi Hedren as socialite Melanie Daniels, and Rod Taylor as Mitch Brenner, a hulking beau suitor for her with an icy mother (Jessica Tandy, in a good performance). In public Hitchcock spoke tongue-in-cheek about performers and on the set he could be equally cruel; but in private it's clear he knew how important they were. His technical masterpieces — and, to be fair, on a technical level The Birds is among his most ambitious films – all succeed in part because they're driven by rapturous performances. Think James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window; Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo; Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest; Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh in Psycho; and the list goes on. Hedren and Taylor bring little to The Birds aside from being rough visual equivalents of Hitchcock's two beau ideals, Kelly and Grant, who were in fact the starting point for both the Melanie and Mitch characters. (Alas, Hitchcock lamented, Kelly was busy "being a princess" and "why should I give Cary fifty percent of the movie?")

Famously, or perhaps infamously, Hedren was to be Hitchcock's "next big thing," the reincarnation of Kelly's screen presence after his pursuit of Vera Miles ultimately failed. He had spotted Hedren in a commercial (sans dialogue, mind you) and recruited her as a potential star for The Birds, although did not make it clear until much later. He schooled her in Hitchcock 101: at the director's home, she watched Rebecca, Notorious, and To Catch a Thief, then acted out scenes from those movies with Hitchcock directing her. He made consultations on wardrobe and jewelry and, as his way was wont to be, attempted to build her up. He was so involved in her cultivation that she declared years later that "Melanie Daniels was his character," not her own. It was a miscalculation on Hitchcock's part, and The Birds shows that. Although Hedren may have fit his visualization of a latter-day Kelly, on screen she lacks the depth Kelly brought to her three roles in the director's films. Hitchcock may not have been classically trained in the art of acting, but he had the tremendous luck of having talented people star and co-star in his films and carry them through.

But the lead performances aside, there's still a great deal working well in The Birds. Although the script might not be the director's tightest, it takes risks and pulls off many of them. Scheduling conflicts prevented Hitchcock from recruiting Ray Bradbury as screenwriter (would have been great, right?), and so crime writer Evan Hunter came on board to adapt the 1952 novella of the same name by Daphne du Maurier, the third time Hitchcock would bring her material to the screen. It was tumultuous writing process, and Hunter was eventually made sour by the changes Hitchcock did after the screenwriter's time on the film officially ended, but some of the decisions are for the best, most notably the reason behind the birds' attacking. Simply put, there isn't any. In the immortal words of Norman Bates, we all go a little mad sometimes, and the birds begin attacking people, then keep attacking people, and not once in the whole movie are given any hint as to why. Hitchcock and his writers searched for one, but eventually went with the pessimistic and haunting reason of absolutely nothing. The final scenes were even pared back from a larger, more expansive view of the whole community devastated by birds, to (and I think it was for the best) simply watching the car full of our characters slowly roll away. Considering that final shot and the absence of any "The End" title card, the surreal and disturbing effect is heightened to the extreme.

It's the best decision in the film, followed by the pacing — which, although it drives some mad, I think is richly rewarding. Almost half of the length passes before a bird attacks, no doubt a storytelling technique that greatly influenced Steven Spielberg. Such a move is a gamble, no doubt, but it pays off in the film's final hour of pure tension, which follows the bird attacks getting tighter and tighter until the triumphant sequence where, crouched in the corner of a small room, birds relentlessly attack Melanie. (For the record: that took one whole week to film, using both real and animatronic birds, and reportedly sent Hedren toward a nervous breakdown.)

Many of Hitchcock long-time collaborators returned for The Birds after a brief departure during Psycho, including cinematographer Robert Burks and production director Robert Boyle. George Tomasini was again editor, and composer Bernard Herrmann was on hand, although The Birds features no score and instead utilizes real and ambient bird sounds that he supervised to create atmosphere. (Say what you will about the film's ultimate effect, but Hitchcock the Experimentalist was in full swing with an unknown lead actress, no music, a huge budget, and thousands of birds. Appropriately, the film was given a special premiere screening at the Museum of Modern Art.)

Tomasini was a sublime career editor, whose best work was with Hitchcock. From the back-and-forth voyeurism of Rear Window to the crop-duster attack of North by Northwest and the shower scene of Psycho, he brought structural success to so many pivotal moments in Hitchcock films. His work on The Birds is equally dynamic, a striking balance of slow suspense (think Melanie outside the school, the birds slowly accumulating on the monkey bars behind her) to a literally explosive elements (the explosion that occurs in the gas station during a bird attack). For Burks and Boyle, the photography and art direction on The Birds is still quite impressive today — maybe among the most technically complex and startling of Hitchcock's canon. Hitchcock brought on Ub Iwerks, the former animator and Walt Disney collaborator, to serve as a "special photography adviser" to the film and to oversee the optical printing technique he had invented. The four brought more 300 matte trick-shots to the screen, blending thousands of real and fake birds, and pushing the boundaries of conventional special effects. The crème de la crème of these sequences is the final ominous shot, a car slowly driving away with birds covering the landscape. Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan notes Hitchcock called it "the most difficult single shot I've ever done"—thirty-two different camera exposures layered atop each other to create a single image.

Hunter, the film's screenwriter, recalled Hitchcock boasting that "he was entering the Golden Age of his creativity. He told me The Birds would be his crowning achievement." I don't think either critical or popular consensus reaches that conclusion, and ultimately I don't think Hitchcock did. But the association of the director to birds remains as conclusive proof that The Birds is, in a general sense, among Hitchcock's most recognizable films in the social consciousness. One could make the case that the three most "pop culture" films occurred in successive order: North by Northwest, Psycho, and then this film. In their own unique ways, each speaks to the magic of making movies and watching them. And while The Birds falls short of masterwork status, it's an important film in the Hitchcock chronology — and a damn good horror flick at that.

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Psycho (1960)

d. Alfred Hitchcock / USA / 109 mins.


Note: You may think it ridiculous to submit a warning that this review discusses significant plot details and should only be read by those acquainted with the film, but if teaching at the college level has taught me anything, it's that each year at least two-thirds of my intro-level creative process class are neither familiar with Psycho nor its most famous sequence. In any event, if you're new to the film, you've been warned.

Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker in 2008, noted that we're inclined to think genius "is inextricably tied up with precocity," essentially something that thrives on the energy we have in our younger days. Among his many examples are Orson Welles, who made Citizen Kane at 25; Herman Melville, who began writing a novel per year in his twenties and finished Moby-Dick by 32; Pablo Picasso, discovered at 20; and Mozart, who wrote Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at 21. He might have included Bob Dylan, who had gone from Freewheelin' to Blonde on Blonde before he was 25, or Paul McCartney, who was not yet 28 by the time the Beatles had broken up.

But then – and Gladwell mentions him specifically by name – there was Alfred Hitchcock. The director went to work behind the camera at the age of 26; his first film, The Pleasure Garden, was made after years as an apprentice designing title cards. He broke onto the scene with The Lodger when he was 28, and before he turned forty he made The Man Who Knew Too Much (35 years old), The 39 Steps (36 years old), and The Lady Vanishes (39 years old). Yet the director's unmatched masterpieces were all made after he turned fifty.

His most famous film, and in many ways his most experimental, is Psycho, the film Hitchcock biographer Patrick McGilligan dubbed as possibly "the most overly familiar motion picture in history." It is only when one sits down and tries to imagine something new to say about the film that one's brain begins to shake. What is left to say that hasn't been written countless books and essays, hasn't been taught in any random liberal arts college course, and hasn't been dissected now on the Internet? Not much new it seems, but plenty worth repeating because it focuses in on the particular genius of Hitchcock and how, at 61, he managed to turn his greatest experiment into a canonical piece of cinema.

Released in 1960, Psycho was a turning point even for the man who always seemed to procure a previously unknown corner. There's a necessary point to be made about this film coming so late in the director's career: in the 1940s he often experimented for the sake of effect (Lifeboat, Rope, etc.), but in the 1950s and 1960s he experimented as a way to drive a stake into the establishment for the sake of profundity. Psycho deviates from the director's films of the previous decade in three important ways: it was cheap and fast, made with only half of his standard crew; it was scandalously sexual and was among the loudest announcements that the 1950s were definitively over; and the director had a greater monetary stake in its success than he had ever had before.

Hitchcock pitched the film to Paramount and his staff as "a simple, low-budget American shocker, in the style of his TV show, which would provide a breather from more lavish, grandiose productions" (McGilligan). But few were as excited as he, and as ironic as it may seem, he ended up forging ahead on production with a crew largely different from the reliable personnel he repeatedly used on his films. His steadfast cinematographer, Robert Burks, who had worked on almost every Hitchcock film in the 1950s, had been assigned to a different project; the same went for famed production designer Robert Boyle. (They were replaced by a cameraman and production director who had both worked extensively with the director on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.) His only real long-time collaborator carryovers were editor George Tomasini and composer Bernard Herrmann.

To save money, Hitchcock deferred his salary (more on that in a moment), shot in black-and-white (as much for budgetary reasons as to disguise the color of blood), and kept the project as low-key as possible. He anonymously bought Robert Bloch's 1959 novel through an agent for a one-time fee of $9,000, and the whole production cost Paramount around $800,000 (about $5.5 million, in 2007 dollars), roughly one-fifth the cost of his previous film, North by Northwest. Cheap then, comparatively, and quick, too; but cost and speed in the context of Hitchcock don't equate to inattentive. Although he intended Psycho to look like a B-movie, the distance between a poverty-row production like Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour and this film is still quite cavernous. In other words, Hitchcock was willing to sacrifice a lot but he wasn't willing to sacrifice the essential elements — the star, the vision, the tightness of the screenplay, the intentional foray into controversy, the meticulous planning — that makes a Hitchcock film what it is.

Psycho proves itself a continual reward because of those essential elements on the part of the director, the right knowledge of where to cut and what to keep. Few directors could work artifice into theme like Hitchcock, but with Psycho he proved he hadn't lost the talent honed on the cheap in England of producing brilliance on a budget. Hitchcock's cinematic language in Psycho is clear and careful. A friend of mine once suggested Citizen Kane is the easiest film to teach because Orson Welles lays out his cinematic language in the most obvious and instructional of ways. I countered with Psycho, which I teach to my creative process class. Because it has a forest's worth of paper devoted to it, few films document the movie-making process and the collaborative nature of the industry better.

Consider the point, still early in the film, when Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) stops at the Bates Motel in the middle of a rainstorm, where she meets the caretaker, Norman (Anthony Perkins). The levels to which Hitchcock is able to manipulate your impressions of the scene, from the obvious to the subconscious, are still staggering to this day. Those new to the film waver between comfort and fear; we're trained to feel leery of such isolated locales, but also to be cautious of driving in intense weather. Marion makes the best decision she can at that moment, and we go along with it. A lesser director might let the tension deflate, but Hitchcock builds it steadily. Is she safe? We seem to think so; Hitchcock even slips into the frame a textual cue through a folded newspaper in Marion's purse, the banner headline stating voters have okayed a particular measure, but due to the shape of the folds, only the word "OKAY" can be read.

Our radar is made murky by Perkins' performance as Norman, impeccable to the degree he captures how simultaneously reassuring and creepy awkward niceties can be. There is an ebb and flow of tension and curiosity, Marion obliviousness to her boundaries and Norman fervently aware of his. The pace kept through the editing is remarkable in that it lowers the viewer into comfort through repetition and formality, but willingly jerks us back to the potential danger of the situation by shifting angles or rearranging the staging.

What helps drive this tension is Hitchcock's most subversive element. To the unacquainted, Marion is the film's primary character; so why is Norman such a powerful presence? Why does all of the storytelling elements seem to suggest the two are equal at this point, particularly when one character materializes seemingly out of nothing? The film's center of gravity shifts beneath the scenes of Norman and Marion, culminating in the apex of Marion's story and what emerges as the foothills of Norman's: the infamous shower scene.

It is one of cinema's lasting treasures, for all the obvious reasons. Storyboarded by Saul Bass, filmed over the course of one week, and put together as a montage from 78 flash pieces of film, the shower scene of Psycho justly earns its the cinematic canon for what it is (a horrifying murder, the likes of which still haunt showerers to this day) and what it is not (lacking in general fanfare, discreet and even-handed with only the slightest moment of penetration between knife and flesh). It stands on its own, of course, but it is richer in its form and meaning inside the context of the film — the glimmer of hope we have for Marion, recanting on her crime; the virtual silence of a person's unknown last moments followed by the staccato of Herrmann's icy strings; eventually Norman's frantic clean-up and the equally powerful scene of the sinking car in the nearby pond. It is an expertly built sequence (is there another of equal cultural recognition and cinematic skill?), yet it possesses all the more merit for serving not only as pure cinema but a gearshift inside Psycho, the moment the story officially transcends Marion and is placed between Norman's shoulders. (We indeed follow him all the way through to the end, when the film makes the slightest misstep by giving a fumbling and verbose diagnosis of Norman from a prison psychologist; although to be fair, it was a decision Hitchcock deliberately made to bring the film to a close as soon as possible and avoid any kind of decompression on the audience's part.)

Not surprisingly, the Production Code board struggled with Psycho. They railed against the opening scenes, where Leigh is shown in her white lingerie after her unmarried afternoon tryst Sam Loomis (John Gavin), and of course they shrieked at the shower sequence — and, no doubt to Hitchcock's delight, it was because of the scene's potential display of nudity rather than the brutal murder. Stephen Rebello, author of the definitive Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, reports that three members of the board believed they saw nudity and two did not. They demanded Hitchcock remove the nudity and screen the film for them again. But when it came back, the breakdown reversed itself: now the three who had previously seen nudity were satisfied, but the other two were livid. McGilligan reports:

[Hitchcock's] final maneuver was volunteering to reshoot the opening if he could leave the shower sequence alone—adding the stipulation that the censors had to show up on the set for the reshoot because he was confused as to how to satisfy their objections. The story—perhaps apocryphal—is that the reshoot was scheduled, but the censors never materialized, so nothing was changed. "And," script supervisor Marshal Schlom said, "they finally agreed they didn't see the nudity in the shower sequence which, of course, was there all the time."

The Production Code office signed off on Psycho, and numerous decency boards cautioned heavily against it. But Psycho was one of the gambits in the late 1950s and early 1960s that helped severely weaken the previous strength of the Code. It was a phenomenon upon release, and with so many people flocking to see it, the culture tide began to splash against the censors.

No film up to that time created as many return visits than Psycho, which proved glorious for Hitchcock. In order to persuade Paramount to fund the film, he deferred his standard salary and directed it free, on the condition that he be considered 60 percent owner of it until Paramount hit its intended box office goal and then all further revenue and ownership would be his. He heavily marketed the film himself, appearing in its trailers and dropping clues to its mysteries and insisting no one would be admitted once the film had begun. It was the second-largest grossing film of 1960 and earned Hitchcock his fifth and final Best Director nomination from the Academy Awards.

McGilligan notes that Hitchcock always insisted he never foresaw Psycho as a blockbuster, and that any money he earned from it was a "secondary consideration" to making the film itself. With many others, you'd have to wonder if that's true, but I think in Hitchcock's case it genuinely was. The film's screenwriter, Joseph Stefano, always believed Hitchcock was drawn to Psycho because of his and his wife's illnesses in the late 1950s, making "the picture at the very time he was grappling with his own mortality." That may be why Psycho was and remains Hitchcock's last masterpiece. The director had spent an entire career offing people in a variety of ways and for a multitude of reasons, but certainly no other Hitchcock film showed the randomness of death in such a shocking and emotionally powerful way. This is a capstone to an unparalleled career.

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The Best Films of 2000

Note: This essay was originally published as part of the Counting Down the Zeroes film series.

Here are my selections for favorite films from the year 2000, ranked alphabetically. Eligible films received a first-run theatrical release in the United States during the year. Honorable mentions have been capped at ten.

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Almost Famous
(d. Cameron Crowe / USA)

Cameron Crowe's valentine to rock n' roll kicked off a decade that, though unknown at the time, would come to be heavily soaked with nostalgia. Each of the film's many levels (its autobiographical coming-of-age story, its cultural commentary and satire, its meditation on love and loss, and its revelation of the sadness behind a curtain of fantasy) floods the mind like a series of progressively euphonic chords. Crowe's script, which follows teen writer William Miller (Patrick Fugit) as he tags along with a 1970s rock band on an assignment for Rolling Stone, was well deserving of its Oscar. And the performances — particularly Fugit as Crowe's teenage alter ego; Frances McDormand as his harried mother; Kate Hudson as an angelic groupie; Billy Crudup as a rock guitarist; and Philip Seymour Hoffman as critic Lester Bangs — are ballads unto themselves.

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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(d. Ang Lee / Taiwan)

One of the few films to be nominated for Oscars in both the Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film categories, Ang Lee's mythical martial arts spectacular blew many away upon its debut in 2000 and still, I'd argue, has the ability at the very least to ruffle your hair on subsequent viewings. Although the film has many qualities you wouldn't necessarily associate with action films—it's a period piece, decorated with classic romanticism and serenity and laced with a strong feminist edge—it is nonetheless a declarative example of the well-thought and well-made action film that values plot and character but still knows how to delight the eye. Lee recruited the choreographer of The Matrix (Yuen Woo Ping) to plan his fighting sequences, many of which defy gravity but, fitting with the film's mythos, feel more authentic and less gimmicky than the previous film. This is a top-to-bottom example of glorious filmmaking.

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George Washington
(d. David Gordon Green / USA)

This first feature film of David Gordon Green, made when he was 25 and coming out of film school in North Carolina, is a depository of my dictionary's adjectives: lyrical, stirring, mysterious, haunting, etc. And yet the best adjective to describe this independent film — Malickian — hearkens back to a different sort of language and can't be found between the covers of Webster. Green's proficiency is best demonstrated through the on-screen laconism captured by cinematographer Tim Orr, set in a hollowed out but ethnically diverse southern town with a postcards-from-the-wasteland sort of feel. There are some ways in which George Washington reflect Green's youthfulness and inexperience (as J. Hoberman put it, his "intentions are as obscure as his command of film craft is unclear — his originality is indistinguishable from his mistakes"), but instead of detracting from the experience, they are unexpectedly enriching.

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High Fidelity
(d. Stephen Frears / USA)

The things men do in High Fidelity — forming top-five lists where any subject is eligible for enumeration; hypothetically pitting one artist against another; drifting untethered through the land mines of love and commitment — are not new, but the vibrant appeal of Stephen Frears' adaptation of Nick Hornby's novel is an experience of equal parts freshness and joy. So much of that is owed to the voice, not only in Hornby's words through the characters but in Frears' language, which blends the past with the present with impressive and hilarious trenchancy.

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Requiem for a Dream
(d. Darren Aronofsky / USA)

From its expressionistic cinematography to the frightening suddenness of its descent into a virtually unwatchable final half-hour, Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is a sensory and cinematic overload. This tale of four desperate addicts and their nightmarish fates is ultimately depressing as hell in its story and thematic elements, but a conversely enthralling display of pure cinema. Ellen Barkin delivers the performance of the year as an amphetamine-addled widow who dreams of the attention and love a moment on television could bring to her lonely life.

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Thirteen Days
(d. Roger Donaldson / USA)

The eyes of a film critic are on a constant scour for works of originality and excitement, but sometimes excitement proves itself to be enough. There is not much fresh earth upturned in Roger Donaldson's Thirteen Days, a potboiler political thriller documenting the Cuban Missile Crisis inside the Kennedy administration, but it is swift, urgent, and punchy. The point-of-view character is Kenneth O'Donnell, a real aide to the president, who lets us observe the cool intellect of JFK (a gallant Bruce Greenwood) in the crossfire of his cabinet secretaries, his military advisers, and his conscience. Even if its core demographic trends more toward The History Channel set, Thirteen Days satisfies the cinematic desire for excitement in multiple ways.

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Traffic
(d. Steven Soderbergh / USA)

Determined to make a film about drugs that didn't revolve around addicts, director Steven Soderbergh pursued an American adaptation of a U.K. mini-series chronicling three interwoven tales of the effects drugs have society. His resulting film, Traffic, is a knock-out in every sense of the word. The greatest successes are when Soderbergh holds close to look, pace, and balance of documentary, and the information can be compelling and clear without becoming didactic. Although the film went on to win numerous Oscars — supporting actor for Benecio del Toro, adapted screenplay for Stephen Gaghan, director for Soderbergh, and an honor for editing — there's still a compelling impression of individuality and independence to Traffic, echoed by the fact that all major Hollywood studios passed on the film and, fittingly, ate their hats in the end.

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The Wind Will Carry Us
(d. Abbas Kiarostami / Iran)

Stark, spiritual, and endlessly rewarding, The Wind Will Carry Us is Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's poetic statement on a well-lived life. An engineer arrives at a small, secluded town, his immediate purpose there a mystery to both the villagers and the audience. As the film unfolds we follow the engineer as he makes contact with the community and the outside world, in a delicate pace that keeps us both guessing and utterly engaged. The cinematography is similarly slow but savors the barren world and its few surprisingly bountiful elements. In a lovely way it's all there before us, even if we are at first blind to it. It's a fulfillment of the correlation famously espoused by Ernest Hemingway's iceberg theory: 90 percent of the world may be hidden from view, but nonetheless its sensations can reverberate. Kiarostami knows that and is determined that we feel each subtle shock.

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Wonder Boys
(d. Curtis Hanson / USA)

At once both a humiliating and necessary thing to admit, I appreciate Wonder Boys today far more than I did upon its release in 2000. This is the tale of a stymied writer and professor whose world seemingly falls apart (or does it?) in the course of a weekend-long literary festival at the university where he teaches. I've tried to put my finger on what it is I failed to connect with on the first past — too young? too idealistic? too ingenuous? — but this time Wonder Boys spoke to the self-exiled adversity in art in a way that few films that attempt the topic do. Michael Douglas, who stars as the writer and professor, had a banner year in 2000 with this film and Traffic, but his performance here is careful and smoldering with a relatable lukewarmness. Although still revered by many, today the film glows like a hidden gem to me.

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Yi Yi
(d. Edward Yang / Taiwan)

The most strikingly beautiful aspect of Edward Yang's masterful Yi Yi are the numerous reflections: lights and silhouettes rippling in windows, a longing stare out into nothingness but also a stare into physical figures, into the very humanity of the characters. The motif is staggeringly apropos—this three-hour, multi-layered examination of middle-class family in contemporary Taiwan stares into the very souls of its audience. Like life the film is haunting, funny, tragic, beautiful, ugly, surprising, and comfortably cyclical. Yang also wrote the film, which, despite its length, is one of the most remarkably paced films I've come across. There's nary a moment I would second-guess a decision Yang made in crafting this exquisite film.

Honorable Mention:
Before Night Falls (d. Julian Schnabel); Best in Show (d. Christopher Guest); Chicken Run (d: Peter Lord & Nick Park); Croupier (d. Mike Hodges); Erin Brockovich (d. Steven Soderbergh); Hamlet (d. Michael Almereyda); Jesus' Son (d. Alison Maclean); O Brother, Where Art Thou? (d. Joel & Ethan Coen); Pollock (d. Ed Harris); The Virgin Suicides (d. Sofia Coppola)

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Favorite Film Characters Meme

My thanks to The Film Doctor for tagging me in this meme, which is supposed to be my 10 favorite film characters, but, as you can clearly see, I've stretched to encompass a few dozen. I've been working overtime assembling a top-ten list for the year 2000 as part of Film for the Soul's Counting Down The Zeroes series, and this was a welcome change for the evening.

In a way I feel like I should have hewn a narrow line and listed only those characters created specifically for cinema, but that leaves out too many great roles that were brought to life by talented actors and actresses. I tried to list off the names of the characters that came to me immediately and didn't try to over-analyze this too much. Your thoughts are, as always, appreciated; your contributions to the meme, as always, are warranted — consider yourself tagged.

Alphabetical by first name:

Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), Annie Hall
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Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), The 400 Blows
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Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), To Kill a Mockingbird
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Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker), Strangers on a Train
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Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook), All the President's Men
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Clockwise from the left: Capt. Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers), Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers), Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), Dr. Strangelove
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Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), The Silence of the Lambs
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Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
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Juror #8 (Henry Fonda), 12 Angry Men
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The Lone Prospector (Charles Chaplin), The Gold Rush
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Nick Charles (William Powell), The Thin Man
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Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day
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Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx), Duck Soup
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The Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), The Wizard of Oz
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Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), Bringing Up Baby
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Honorable Mentions: Annie Hall (Diane Keaton), Annie Hall; Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), Rebecca; Dumbo, Dumbo; Harry Lime (Orson Welles), The Third Man; Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) and Walter Burns (Cary Grant), His Girl Friday; Howard Beale (Peter Finch), Network; Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura), Seven Samurai; L.B. Jeffries (James Stewart), Rear Window; Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), Psycho; Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando), A Streetcar Named Desire; Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando, Robert DeNiro), The Godfather & The Godfather Part II

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Pinocchio (1940)

d. Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen / USA / 88 mins.


Many argue Pinocchio is as close as Walt Disney came to technical perfection, and, although it is not my favorite film of his, I find it difficult to disagree. Of all the animated features he produced, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938 to The Jungle Book in 1967, the art of Pinocchio feels the most alive. Its location in the canon — as Disney's second animated narrative feature, released the same year as his first avant-garde film, Fantasia — seems to contribute to this sense. The excitement of feature animation hadn't yet become standardized, and the exuberance of his animation crew (which had honed its skills on Disney's Silly Symphonies and ultimately Snow White) is still radiates. Now remastered in preparation for its seventieth anniversary, it looks crisp and new. The artwork pops from its careful detail, and patented multi-plane camera produces its best work here, creating an illusion of depth that is almost as convincing as it is visually stunning.

They still make films this beautiful, but rarely do they animated films this frightening. Its parable is as subtle as its carnivorous whale: "good" boys get respect and love and become something, "bad" boys are cast out, isolated, punished, abused, and transformed into donkeys. Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) is a marionette made by the kindly and lonely old Gepetto (voiced by Christian Rub), who longs for the wooden boy to be flesh and blood, someone to love and someone who will love in return. Then, as these things are wont to happen in the world of animation, the Blue Fairy visits and anthropomorphizes the toy, giving him the chance at experiencing life and the opportunity to become a real boy. As a guide he has Jiminy Cricket (voiced by the magnificent Cliff Edwards), his insectoid and de facto conscience. But Pinocchio soon finds himself in the hands of villains.

Naturally in this realm we're stretching the limits of credulity and lacks almost any semblance of realism. So how does Pinocchio manage to still be disturbing? I think the answer lies in the boy's anxiety-inducing innocence. Even when he is lured by a walking-talking fox named Honest John and put into the hands of a Russian sideshow tyrant, he's all smiles. Pinocchio's famous number "I've Got No Strings" — performed on the sideshow where he dances with other puppets — is done with a smile. Sure, he's confused a little bit and very curious, but the film wisely (and nervously, for me) never imbues its character with any adult characteristics; the mission is to become a real boy. Pinocchio only realizes how much danger he is on until he is locked in a cage hanging from the ceiling. It helps too that Jones, the voice of Pinocchio, was only thirteen at the time, his light and cheery falsetto layered gently in the background of otherwise bizarre and suggestive imagery, which, let's not forget, is unsettling on its own. The bad children on Pleasure Island, who smoke and drink and gamble, are transformed into donkeys, stripped of their ability to speak and are eventually put to work on the salt mines. Even as an adult, it can give a chill.

When Pinocchio won Best Score and Best Original Song at the 1941 Academy Awards, it was the first animated film to win in a competitive category. It has truly wonderful songs — there isn't a dud in the bunch — and no doubt that comes from the fact that the film is economical with its music. Although it's 90 minutes long, there are only five songs in Pinocchio (and two reprises). All of them are catchy and appropriate to the film, and Disney front-loads them — we make our way through all five songs before plot of Pinocchio-gone-missing actually begins. They're all well known today: the lovely "When You Wish Upon a Star," frequently covered but never as tender as when Edwards sang it; Gepetto's "Little Wooden Head," Jiminy's "Give a Little Whistle," the aforementioned "I've Got No Strings," and Honest John's snappy "Hi Diddle Lee Dee (An Actor's Life For Me)."

Ironically, for all its stranger and unexpectedly twisted elements, Pinocchio is still often dismissed for sentimentalizing the sketches of Italian writer Carlo Collodi, whose fairy tales of a boy marionette became collected as the book The Adventures of Pinocchio. It's undeniable that the film has heaping spoonfuls of sugar in traditional Disney fashion, but the effect is remarkably balanced. One of Disney's purest talents (in addition to his visionary genius and knack for selecting engaging stories) is a striking sense of pace. If you'd asked me years ago what I thought of Pinocchio (or Snow White or many of the other golden age films), I'd have told you it was boring. Half-hour television might be to blame for why I remember these slim animated features as overly long, but when you enter adulthood, it's nearly impossible not to feel how fast the story gets underway. I've been watching animated films literally since I was an infant, but I was well into my teen years before I truly began to appreciate them. Re-watching Pinocchio, boring was the furthest thought from my mind. The film is slim, yes; stunning yes; terrifying, yes; but hardly boring.

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